Longer article a good read

This is quite a bit longer than most of the posts that I highlight. But since the issue is so important and various views are so prevalent it would be a good systematic read.The article begins on page 42 or at this link: Pastoral Pensées- The Hopelessness of the Unevangelized

Themelios 36.1

T

he Gospel Coalition has published the latest issue of Themelios online.

It is available as a 181-page PDF and in HTML.

Below is a short quote, note my highlighted section.

Pastoral Pensées: The Hopelessness of the Unevangelized

Robert H. Gundry

Robert Gundry is professor emeritus and scholar-in-residence at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, California. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Commentary on the New Testament (Baker, 2010).

Editor’s Note: Recent controversies have swirled around the fate of those who never hear the gospel, arising in no small part because of the searching, even searing, questions posed by many, both Christian and non-Christian. This essay represents a compact, biblical restatement of the urgency and necessity of the call to proclaim the gospel to all the nations so that people may believe in Jesus Christ and be saved.

Lately there has come out of cold storage a question that has been hibernating among conservative evangelicals for some time. That question has to do with the status of people who live and die without ever hearing the gospel of Jesus Christ. Will God consign them to everlasting punishment? If so, where is his sense of fair play—they never had a chance—let alone his love for them? If not, through what means and at what time does he give them opportunity to be saved?

4. Staying within Scripture: The Necessity of Evangelism

The Scriptures stand alone as our source of information concerning the status of the unevangelized. As we have seen, the notions of salvation through general revelation and of an opportunity after death find no solid footing in Scripture. More than that, Scripture indicates the hopelessness of people apart from hearing and believing the gospel now. In Adam all human beings stand under condemnation (Rom 5:12–21). They have rejected general revelation (Rom 1:18–32). God’s wrath remains on them apart from belief in Jesus the Son (John 3:36). The present is the time for such belief: “Behold, now is ‘the acceptable time’; behold, now is ‘the day of salvation’” (2 Cor 6:2). Most clearly of all for our question, Paul puts all these pieces together in Rom 10:9–16 by writing in uninterrupted succession about the necessity to salvation of confessing Jesus as Lord and calling on his name, about the necessity of believing in Jesus for calling on him, about the necessity of hearing of him for believing in him, about the necessity of our preaching the gospel for people’s hearing of him, and about the necessity of sending for preaching. “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom 10:17). We can hardly fail to notice Paul’s focus on the specific message preached concerning the Lord Jesus Christ. And the repeated rhetorical questions, each beginning “How shall they . . .?” show this way of salvation to be the only way. Without the human witness here and now, an essential link is broken; the chain of salvation will not hold.

Since Scripture makes the unevangelized lost and our preaching the gospel to them necessary to their salvation, those who propose contrary views need to adduce more cogent biblical evidence in favor of those views. Otherwise, we should have to move to a decanonized view of revelation as an ever-ongoing process. Biblical particularism and evangelistic necessity, which may have been good enough for olden times, could give way to post-biblical revelation of a theodicy supposedly more just and gracious and conveniently easier to swallow.

But the new truths of salvation by general revelation and of post-mortem conversion would doubtless yield to the even “better” truth of universal salvation. For someone is bound to ask why God even bothers to create beings who he knows ahead of time will respond neither to general revelation nor to special revelation, and why he allows many of them to increase their damnation by giving them more and more revelation that he knows very well they are not going to accept. Either we settle for a technically fair God (he gives everybody an equal opportunity) notably lacking in kindness (he creates people who he foresees will not take advantage of their equal opportunities). Or we save his kindness with the excuse of ignorance (he did not know that many of his creatures would destroy themselves, and even yet he mindlessly keeps on willing them into existence). Or, ironically, having rejected the Calvinistic doctrine of particular election, we universalize the Calvinistic doctrine of irresistible grace. By this time we have strayed so far from Scripture that the whole problem, having lost its biosphere, ceases to exist. Staying within Scripture, however, we discover behind the Great Commission a reason to evangelize the heathen more compelling than the desirability of bringing them into the joy of salvation a little earlier than otherwise they would enter it. The reason is that apart from our preaching to them the word of Christ, they have no hope. So let us urgently and compassionately rescue the perishing.